


Shattered Pride

by calmdad, theholychesse



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (or as close to it as we can get), Avatar Voltron, Future Fic, Moon Spirit Allura, Multi, Steampunk(ish) 1940s kinda setting, genderfluid pidge, here it is it's the avatar au we've all been waiting for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-26 16:43:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7581898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calmdad/pseuds/calmdad, https://archiveofourown.org/users/theholychesse/pseuds/theholychesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a hundred years since Avatar Korra took her place as a fully realized Avatar, and had children, and those children had children, and so on, for so long that the names of Avatar Korra's peers have been forgotten.</p><p>In an age where the Avatar is fractured into five pieces, war comes from every land, every nation, but stems most from the earth. The poisoned earth tread on by huffing machines, puffing smog and smoke into the air, a smoke that also comes from furious warships that herald death and ruination for all.</p><p>Shiro is a false bender with a false limb and a false mind. Lance is a river with no banks to rest on. Keith is a blaze that's been stomped into glowing embers. Hunk longs for freedom but cannot dance among the flighty clouds. Pidge rejects earth and soil in favour of wires and humming machinery. </p><p>All of them are fragments scattered to the four corners of the earth, but the time has come for them to find one another again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

In a realm where time is only marked by those who slip into it in a constant, streaming trickle, there is peace. For in death, there can be no conflict, no war, for there no sin, no ambition, for there is nothing to acquire but age and years in a tepid, stagnant realm.

 

In this world, the only war that could have been fought was between the dark spirits and the light spirits, with the souls of the dead stuck somewhere in-between. However, conflict brought on by their dichotomy no longer appeals to them, for there is nothing to fight for in the spirit world. Only if a spirit slips through the cracks of space and time brought on by solstices or reborn souls, can there be true conflict, for living people and things _are_ something worth fighting over.

 

Spirits, both primordial, elemental beings who never have even lived, and the dead, slowly losing their memory of flesh and blood, always thought their existence would be eternal. For what is dead cannot die again, and what has never been born can never die as well. However, this existence, this state, did not last.

 

It did not last, and to an eternal realm with no birth and no death, came ruin and destruction and decimation and great, hungry beings, made out of a stinking smoke filled with the touch and taste of men. The dark spirits thought these things as their own, and sought to join them in cruel kinship. The light spirits saw them as foes, and attempted to curb their advance and ruination despite the rot and decay around them.

 

The dead wept, for in death, they had little might.

 

But these things only knew hunger, only the visceral, unholy glee of _unmaking_ , of taking a spirit, swallowing it down with a great body that had no limbs and no eyes and no will, only a mouth, an endless appetite. Swallowing and gulping down flailing and screaming prey, and, with no feeling, no delight or disgust, unmaking them, leaving not even energy or atoms or any barest remnant of what once was.

 

The spirits had never known such a threat, a thing that can kill what has never been born, and spirits, dark and light and dead alike, all clutched each other as their dooms came ever so closer.  

 

The spiritual world yellowed and decayed, degraded into disaster and ruin and an empty wasteland crawling with hungry wraiths made out of smog and smoke and sticky slime and glowing poison. The spiritual world is wrecked and wretched and cracked so horribly, so _utterly,_ that it’s protector, a creature born from both flesh and spirit and was born but will never die, was broken as well.

 

The Avatar, the failed protector of the realm eternal, cracked into five pieces, five slivers of soul, of a complete being, and fell down to earth in a fiery shower of destruction, and came to lay in the bellies of five babes.

 

And stewed.

 

And bloomed and whined in turn with the babes, and became them, utterly and completely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _it begins_


	2. Irregular Pentagon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's here, at long last!! Chapter 1, officially! Sorry it took so much time, but, stuff happened. And also, this should be the last chapter with this half poetic feel, so those who aren't a fan of that, rejoice!
> 
> And of course, I couldn't do it without my wonderful co-author, calmdad, and my beta, leadershipping on tumblr!!

When Hunk was born, the wind blew through the spring prairies, and stirred the spanning field of fluffy dandelions, sending their seeds flying into the air. As the sun looked on, Hunk came out of his labouring mother’s womb, and squealed, and held with a bloody hand the thumb of his grinning father.

 

Hunk’s name was something else, once upon a time. He was born with the name for a constellation up above, but, somehow, before he would say his very own name, he kept on saying the names of others. Others who the nomads have never met, nor will ever meet. However, soon enough, he stopped.

 

And in the fields, in the marauding caravans, in the places so many and different that it all blurred together into confusion and flashes of brief memories and smells, this, this was where he was raised. Where Hunk gained the very best qualities of himself, but also most of his very worst.

 

He was loved by his family, a family of a mother and father and sister and her husband, and the people who wandered with them, perhaps not tied by blood but certainly by experience and having taken the brunt of the stern, disapproving gaze of the very purest who use their element.

 

Hunk grew up adoring an elusive slice of meat or roasted vegetable or bowl of watery rice porridge, but also the wind, which was _theirs._ The wind that rose to their calls, to their fingertips, and allowed them to perform tricks and shows that delighted the people in the cities enough into giving enough coin to eat well that week.

 

The wind that made the blue bells chime and whistled through trees to tickle at Hunk’s cheeks.

 

It was a hard life, but a good life, a life that was soon sent toppling to the ground, leaving nothing but a charred wreck in it’s place. His life changed, so horribly, so unfairly. One day, Hunk had been running around with his toddler nephew, playing with the other village children and then running into his father’s arms and kissed all over, and, and the very next day—

 

As the dawn came, as the sky came to be streaked in brilliant pink and blue and orange, there sat one child. One child smeared with ash and sitting surrounded by cinders and cooling corpses and watched as the sky slowly started to brighten and the sun crawled out of the mountains and yawned.

 

The wind rose, like it does every morning, and noticed this quiet little child with arms still burning from the last touch of his parents, and scooped him up into its arms and took him to the nearest collection of his people, those who can bend it and its kin.

 

And it dropped him on a home in the mountains, inhabited by bare headed monks and ruffled the boy’s hair and hurried along its path. And, and the Temple Monks _knew_ that he wasn’t one of them, was an alien for he bore a full head of hair and clothes made from leathers and skins and hand-woven linens, but they’d themselves seen this child float on from the flatlands below and, whether this child be a favourite of a wind spirit or a powerful bender, they couldn’t risk turning away a child that was clearly not one of them, and thus didn’t truly _belong._

 

His head was not shaved. He was given old, ragged clothes, and was given no arrows, at first, at least. He always ate too much, talked too much, gave very little attention to their traditions and their ways, what little they gave to him, and made him do menial work. Carry around stones and clean clothes and carve out roads with his wind bending and hands, and that made him strong and the meals made him big, and they came to call him ‘the Hulk.’

 

He didn’t care for this name, found it too rough and hard and unfriendly, and, long since having forgotten his own name, he called himself a gentler, softer, more attractive ‘Hunk.’ It made it sound like a nickname, instead of his actual name.

 

Hunk could bend the air like the very best of monks, could swing balls of air around to catch and bring down birds flying up above, could make himself weightless and float down from any height, even as an untrained teenager. And so, to curb him, to stop him, they banned him from using it in anything but for in work.

 

They’d tried to push him out the gates and leave him with no choice but to go to the towns below, left him in unfamiliar streets and hushed forests next to a grand city, but each time, each _time_ the wind brought him back, gently made him drift down in the centre of the courtyard, and it’ll whip and whisper around Hunk, before flying off to the west, or the south.

 

Hunk would wave the wind goodbye, each and every time.

 

Hunk spent the further eleven years of his life in that temple, full of disapproving monks and squealing winged lemurs and humming sky bison, who’d all roll over onto their backs for him to reach long resting itches. Hunk befriended the underbelly of the temples, non-benders seeking spiritual enlightenment and who worked as couriers and cooks and delivery boys for the longest time, before being granted their own arrows at a fine, older age.

 

At twelve he was given his wrist arrows, and made a fledgling monk, who could sit outside the temples and kneel and learn humility by thinking on all things. At sixteen those arrows were spread up his arms, and wound around his chest, like a constrictive snake.

 

Hunk was peaceful, kind, full of piety, but not perfect, in the elder monks’ eyes. For they didn’t approve his love of foods, both fine and plain, and thought he would be better without.

 

Hunk knows what it’s like to know hunger. He's grown intimately familiar with the feeling of your stomach being so empty that it's past all pain and instead tries to delude itself into thinking it's full. These monks have never gone without for more than a day in the name of discipline. He's done so for a week out of necessity.

 

Hunk’s life was set. He was going to live out the rest of his days in the temple, slowly growing wiser, more respected, and perhaps, even treated like a true peer. But that wasn’t what happened, for, at 17, he dreamed of a screaming boy with dark eyes and mismatched arms, and dreamt of blue, and of a resounding unity so _right_ that he couldn’t let go of it, even a year later.

 

* * *

 

Lance was told by his grandmother that her father, Mhunda, of the Northern Water Tribe, settled with his wife, Saiar, of the Fire Nation, on their island the year that the Avatar Korra saved the world. That the spirits, so full of joy that day, steered their ship to an island untouched by man for generations, an ample ground for two people to settle in full safety and peace, beyond the touch of most outsiders.

 

Here, on this beautiful, sunny island where great Carp Macaws fly and screech and the yearly migration of Monarch Whales into the air fills them with awe each and every damn year, Lance was born. A middle child, he was born just as the new Tiger Pig babies were being born, and the days were starting to grow longer.

 

Life on the island was slow, idyllic, but could also pass by in a blur of colours and meals and stories and the sight of the great, spanning, warm sea that would greet him every single morning with a gentle lick at his bare toes.

 

From a young age, he felt so _close_ to the sea, to its movements and murmurings and of storms and huge, damaging waves to come. And even then, if the waves swept away an animal or tree or bit of a cliff, then it’ll come to wind around his ankles the very next morning, feeling like it was full of shame and attempting to seek forgiveness.

 

It warned him, at nine years of age, of a wave beyond measure, beyond its control, coming their way, and his family, mostly benders, and him all stepped into the sea and thought and feared and listened to the rustles of the leaves and the lappings of the sea and watched as a huge stretch of it was sucked out, and then returned in the visage of a twenty meter high long wave that, that, that for a moment, made Lance cold and still and _afraid_.

 

Then he saw his nonbending sisters, brothers, nephews and nieces and cousins, all huddled on the land, looking at them at him and he felt hot and angry and—And the wave, the wave that could have consumed them all, the wave that could have left nothing behind but wet land and torn huts, was pushed away and was turned into a shower of salty rain and made the younglings scream and run away from all of the flapping fish that fell to earth to flail on the sand and ogle the land.

 

His life, however, was much the same, full of nighttime stories around the fires and lamenting the lack of pretty girls he could woo with unsurpassable charm, up until he was fourteen years old and the height of three Possum Chickens stacked on top of each other, and had his eyes first lay upon an outsider. They came in a looming warship made out of shiny steel and white steam and came bearing thin and jagged men with bloody wounds and hopeless faces who plead for food and water and rest.

 

Of course Lance's family gives, and gives, and gives, despite some of their wariness, and Lance comes to know the spouses and children and gripping stories of all of them, befriends several Empire lads and lasses and learns of a world beyond, where things are run by steam and coal and great hulking wooden and metal things run around with people in them and the skies are thick with sleek metal birds and hefty air balloons, that people can now go to the very top of a looming tower using a machine fueled by ropes and pulleys and just see the big glorious world sprawled out in front of them and reach out and feel it at their fingertips—

 

And Lance falls in love with it. Falls in love with this world beyond that the Earth people and their orange haired Colonel describe and, and, and at fifteen he leaves with the warship, crying and waving goodbye to his family who, while anxious about it, know that he's always had an adventurer's heart and that he’ll do great things, one day.

 

Months later, he’s knee deep in the sea that he peels away to catch the clams and scallops buried deep in the sand, an easy smile on his face, when he hears the news.

 

And he feels cold, like that day, all those years ago, but it’s a cold that can’t be eased by a glance at his family members, for they’re--They’re just, they’re just...

 

Lance knew there was a war. Even on the island with the most recent outsider being his father, he knew that there was a war, for the sky would sometimes alight with fire, far, far away, and they’d all hear rumblings and sometimes the sea would bring back bits of wrecks and broken bodies, but now, but now the war is _personal_ because.. Because his family, his island, has been destroyed.

 

Destroyed in a naval battle between the Galra Empire and the Fire Confederacy, nothing left behind but splinters and a sole, desolate hut and the quiet murmurings of the sea against the pale gold beach.

 

If Lance had been there, if Lance didn’t abandon them for a selfish whim then they could have fought back, could have stirred the seas and the clouds and gotten rid of the problem like last time and, and, and—

 

And it starts raining. The water creeps in through his weakened will to lap at his toes and then trails up him, and, for a second, for a second it almost felt like the hot embrace of his dozens of family members around him, thick and almost cloying and sweet, so sweet.

 

But for a moment, a moment only.

 

Lance doesn’t change that much that day, or, at least, doesn’t allow people to see that he’s changed. Because that would worry the few remaining people he has to love. But now, his homesickness is so, so, so much worse with no home to return to.

 

And when he’s 17 years old, tangled in furs and wool in a small fishing vessel heading for the frigid North Pole so that he can learn their arts and secrets, he dreams of a boy with tears in his eyelashes slumped in a tepid place and iron on his tongue and a body that’s not his and is _wrong_.

 

He also dreams of blue, of a unity that’s been sucked out of him and that’s left a barren hole in his chest.

 

* * *

 

When Pidge Holt was born, they were called ‘Katie’ and born to a family that, for centuries, expected bending children and jealous non-bending children. Pidge was one of the latter, or, at least, was _supposed_ to be. They were supposed to look up at their older brother with awe and jealousy in their eyes and keep on furiously copying the bending movements of their brother, in the vain hope that they _could_ somehow do it.

 

He wasn’t like that. Pidge, one time, one time, one sole, goddamn time, tried earthbending even after all the tests came out and exclaimed him to be a non-bender, and that was all. From five years of age Pidge left that all behind and, instead discovered something better than the wet earth and hard rock of his parents, found something clean and cold and something that made far, far, _far_ more sense.

 

Machines. Machines were used all over their home for delivering food, for driving them into the city, machines were in the cities and in the homes of others, and the pound of trains against the tracks were audible from their place up in the mountains every morning and evening, and machines, soon, came to be inside their house, their family, too.

 

Pidge came to, sometimes, wishing for earthbending solely so he could learn the art of metal bending, and create the right things in the right shape, and not actually be forced to rely on his metal bending brother for everything.

 

His earth bending parents didn’t get, for the longest time, how Pidge was fine with his fate, more than fine, because benders were a bunch of arrogant dickwads always underestimating non-benders, and bossing them around, just because some “supposed” spirits went and bestowed these things to their ancestors years ago.

 

Needless to say, Pidge didn’t like benders. However, despite his entire family being made out of benders, he _adored_ them beyond words. He adored and were beyond loyal to his curly haired brother, a brother that was always ready to say something witty, or, well, what he _thought_ was witty, but was actually a bit drab and sad. Pidge’s father was beloved, a bender too, a bit too hearty and loud and far too willing to spend ‘father-son’ bonding time fishing by the lakes in the valleys below too, once the whole thing was out.

 

Her mother was--Was someone different. She loved her mother dearly, don’t get her wrong, but she was cold, in many ways, often absent from home and spending time in the cities or even the capital. She was important to the Galran Empire, and, because of it, she was always rarely around. And when she was, she’d hold Pidge, her non-bending child, at arm’s length, would always simply glance at her quiet, horrifyingly smart child, but look at Matt like he was the world.

 

When Pidge shuffled up to the dinner table, at twelve years old, and told them that she didn’t feel quite like a girl, but not quite a boy, or anything else, they didn’t--They didn’t take it badly. She hadn't expected them to, but still, the fear was there. They were shocked, of course, and her brother came to terms with it quicker, always asking what pronouns he should use, and never saying, “Kai-Pidge!” like her father did at times.

 

Their mother took the longest to get used to it, and once, Pidge walked by their parents’ room in the dead of the night to rifle their hands through the guts of a metal man once again, they heard weeping. The weeping of their mother, and muttered words of, “Maybe if I’d been around more, then maybe she’d have turned out more of a woman.” And Pidge’s blood ran cold but they didn’t run away, they didn’t, and instead calmly, quietly, walked on, hands curled into fists and head hung with their lower lip trapped between their teeth.

 

At fourteen, at the time when other child bearing folks would be meeting handsome boys, yet alone someone with his last name and his kind of grand, rich house, he was instead given something new. Something special. Something one of a kind, given to him by a grim faced mother who asked him to do good. Something that hummed and sat cold under his hands, but with a few inputs of numbers and letters, could think on something, and _answer_ him.

 

It was a Quantifier, a new machine developed in the underbellies of Ba Sing Se, or, at least, a simple enough quantifier that it could fit in his work lab. A simple, stupid, plain little quantifier that meant the world to Pidge. A quantifier that was quickly unravelled and deconstructed into base parts, so that Pidge could understand it inside and out, could make copies and improve and--

 

And barely a month later, her brother went to war. He went to war with her Father, a High Colonel, and never came back from their very first mission.

 

Her mother disappeared soon to go the capital, coming back rarely and only to check on the house and the grounds, before going back, alone.

 

Their dinner table to sit only her, and the food, and soon, not even the food, for she’d haul her robots up on top, her paper and her abacus and pens ,and furiously try to think of a machine, a quantifier, able to track the unique energy, radiation that a bender gave off, and use it and narrow it down to--To find--

 

At sixteen they couldn’t stand it any longer. Couldn’t stand being alone in a house that was slowly growing closer and sharper and more and more inhospitable. Couldn’t stand their mother coming by with noble-born boys with the same exact smile and appraising leer. Couldn’t stand by building and tinkering when they could find her family on their own two feet.

 

Pidge took his tools, a car he’d practically made with his own two hands, the prototype he’d spent a year and a half building, and drove off, never to visit his childhood home again.

 

The next two years were years of wandering, hiding, sneaking and stealing and getting men who knew something drunk and loose tongued, and running from town to town, house to house, inn to inn, in an effort to be efficient, but also ending up horrendously alone in the process.

 

One night when Pidge was 17, barely more than a year after voluntarily becoming homeless, they dreamt of something cool and soothing and blue, but also of a boy, a kindred-alien boy with shaking hands and sunken eyes and a heartbeat and breathing pattern that Pidge knew all too well.

 

They woke up slowly, in a comfortable bed, and looked out the window at  Kemurkage, and the lights of the night time city were blinding and beautiful and twinkling like the stars that never showed themselves in the cities, and, despite their dream, that boy, that _need_ that was born in their chest, they couldn’t do it. They already had a mission, and so went back to bed and closed their eyes, in order to begin a search in the early morning with vigour and energy.

 

* * *

 

When Keith was born, there was a fire in an ancient forest that rose to greater and greater heights, it's flaming fingers licking greedily at each new inch of bark and branch it could find. The other elements had their uses in protecting, healing, stabilizing, but fire was hungry and only that. Fire was voracious. Fire was temperamental. Fire required taming.

 

The talents of a half dozen students and their teacher in firebending wasn’t enough to stop the blaze; they could only keep it at bay for so long before it broke their hold, roaring its fury. Still they toiled, the air around them bending and wavering with the sheer force of its heat, before all at once it died out, as if some great force had stamped upon it with one mammoth foot.

 

Miles away, an infant drew its first breath and used it to scream.

 

When his parents heard the news, compared it against the time their beloved first child was born, they called him a miracle. His name hadn’t yet been decided, but the meaning was clear enough, for the child that seemed to have devoured the fire whole and taken its power for his own. This one would be a bender, sure as sunrise, though he was still too young to show any talent for the art.

 

Growing up, their fire-eater was fascinated by flames. He was forever being warned away from cookfires and matches, mesmerized by the glowing tips of old men’s cigars, entranced by lanterns and their flickering dance in the dark instead of rest and dreaming.

 

His mother’s hands always clasped onto his own whenever he’d spread out his palms, close his eyes, and imagine conjuring a flame. ‘When you’re older,’ She’d say. ‘For fire kills and hurts as much as it can aide and heal.’

 

Keith’s father worked in the city nearby, even as the family and community lived far in the countryside, enduring long, hot days, and then dancing and making merry in the short, cool nights. The summers were hot, the winters wet, and Keith would play with the Rabbit Frogs and ride around on Genji, the family Komodo Rhino that was a beast of burden.

 

Life could get tough on the farm, when the rains came late or the winter became too long, but it was still an idyllic life. An idyllic life that warped and changed one day, when his mother was out in the fields one day, and saw a trope of men riding on Mongoose Lizards, with smarmy grins and axes and bomb-ropes strapped their backs.

 

These men attempted to negotiate. All of the grain and food in their homes and storages in exchange for the lives of the people. Some wanted to cave, but others knew that the winter would come soon, and they wouldn’t be able to survive with nothing in storage. But raiders were a known thing, and always won, one way or another, and were about to agree, before the raiders grew bored.

 

And before a decision could be made, they threw a bomb into the crowd of people that included his father, and Keith watched as his father was torn into bits and his body shredded with shrapnel, body still and heated, before he was beckoned to run, to flee by his mother, who’d put up a wall of fire in a desperate attempt to save them all, and, and--

 

And Keith doesn’t remember much of that day. Only that he’d felt hot, incredible hot, and felt electricity dancing at the tips of his fingers and rage coil low and hot and hard in his belly. Remembered how in the end, as he rode out of the village on Genji with nothing on him but his clothes, covered in ash and charcoal, no one tried to stop him.

 

At eight, Keith became a homeless orphan, and in order to survive in a big, scary world, that frowned upon wild brown nosed firebending children, he hopped from town to town, blending in and picking pockets and stealing apples and baked goods from stalls when no one was looking, and ended up in the capital, when he was ten years old.

When Keith was twelve years old, he’d reached into the pockets of a taller boy, well dressed and ten kinds of handsome all rolled up into one person, and felt a firm, unyielding hand grasp around his wrist.

 

Keith could have, with a high kick, sent a flurry of flame at the boy’s face. Could have twisted his wrist and broken his own thumb, to slide out his hand out of the grasp and set the boy alight, still alive and conscious. Keith could have done so much, but he didn’t, instead he stared wide eyed at a boy who looked at him just the same, and heard him whisper, “Do I know you?”

 

The boy’s name was Shiro, and despite how much Keith’s instincts were telling him to run, for him to furiously be alone and safe again, he--He followed this boy to a nearby restaurant, where they sat down over tea and spicy fruit cakes and talked. And talked, and talked, and talked, and when the evening grew close and the owner anxious, Shiro asked him if they could meet tomorrow in Shinowa Park.

 

And Keith did, remarkably enough. And met him time and time again, and soon, Shiro got Keith to stop picking pockets, got him working in the house of his family as a gardener, and was able to sleep over and talk with and eat with Shiro to his heart’s content.

 

When Keith was around with Shiro, he felt complete. He felt complete and whole and a new kind of person. His core felt hot and his mind felt free and he’d come to hold Shiro’s hand when they walked across a road, and continue to hold it for hours after that. Keith found himself sleeping more sweetly than ever in his lap, Shiro’s warm fingers carding through his hair reverently.

 

When Shiro was sixteen, Keith kissed him on the lips for the first time when, that morning, he was going to the local garrison to train to be a soldier fighting against the Galrans. Keith was proud of him, but was scared, and horrified of what could happen to him out there. His heart pounded, screamed and struck out at his rib cage, for days on end, in his sheer worry.

 

However, soon that worry faded into an ache of the heart and body and mind, as Keith came to _miss_ him, terribly and awfully, and trained and sparred until he was sore and exhausted, all for the off chance that he would be taken too, despite his bad blood, Shiro’s protecting words, and his criminal past.

 

When Shiro went on his first mission, he disappeared, and Keith’s heart shattered and reformed into something oozing and disgusting and sticky.

 

At 17, in a desolate corner of the world, searching and searching, he had a vision of him. Of Shiro, afraid and scared and angry and nervous and worried for _him,_ most of all, saw him bloody and beaten and broken and no matter how much Keith screamed, Shiro didn’t hear him. And, that day, Keith climbed onto a boat and went back to the capital, because he knew, he _knew_ , that Shiro was going to come home soon.

 

And that he did.

 

* * *

 

Shiro, when he was born, was born on a cold mountain in the very northern peak of the Fire Confederacy, and exactly four months later his ambassador parents stepped onto a bright streamer, and an infant Shiro was lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves beating against their cabin walls.

 

The walls of a ship and its open decks became just as familiar as solid rock and lavish cabin houses that had two, nameless servants in each. At times, even, Shiro would travel by air in an elegant passenger plane or by an air conditioned car.

 

Home was subjective to what time of year it was, to what was happening to international politics at the time, and whether another set of ambassadors had disappeared and his parents were forced to scramble back over to that nation. Home wasn’t even where his family were, for they were often out of the house to work, leaving Shiro to form shallow, brief bonds with the village kids until he was forced to move into another city once again.

 

They moved, and moved, practically twice a year, for ten long, dragging years. And one day, he’d grown sick of it. He’d grown sick and tired of it and put his foot down and _begged_ for his parents to settle down somewhere, so that he could have friends, a consistent curriculum, just _some_ kind of semblance to a normal life.

 

His parents were apprehensive, unsure, up until the day when his mother lost a leg and an eye due to shrapnel from a bomb strapped to the underside of her car. That day, Shiro heard his father making a call to his brother, Shiro’s uncle, who lived in a snug mansion in the center of the Fire Confederacy capital, with a government school nearby that would no doubt challenge Shiro’s intelligence, and his wish to join the army.

 

That was also something--From a young age, Shiro had wished, and wished, and prepared for a jaunt in the military. Serving the government that made his life shattered and his friends numerous and forgotten, was something he didn’t feel all that comfortable with. But the longer he was in Galra territory, the more he saw how their people were treated, how the government oppressed and terrorized its people--The more fury and rage and protectiveness Shiro felt for people he barely even knew.

 

Once, there was a pregnant mother, holding a toddler by the hand, who was refused to go into a shop because of the way she was dressed and her ‘class’. Shiro took her hand, and looked up into the eyes of the man at the door, and told him, “Move, would you kindly.” And bought the women eggs and fruit and bread with his own coin, much to the annoyance of his father.

 

When Shiro and his parents settled into his uncle’s home, Shiro wore the garb of a Fire Confederacy boy regularly, styled his hair like a youth of the area, and learned the history and tales of his people, not just the ones of the region he was in. And in the capital, he saw a similar scene, like the one he’d seen when he was younger.

 

Of a mother being stoically denied lodgings for the night for herself and her son because she wore the wrong clothes, had skin of a kind of tone that waterfolk had, and Shiro took her into the grounds, gave her a room with the servants, and was delighted beyond belief when, as her son played in the gardens, his uncle offered her a job as a maid. The women cried, and hugged them both, and they became familiar faces around here.

 

Soon, however, his parents were called out to the Galra Empire again, for they were the nation’s best. His mother, despite being scarred both in flesh and in mind, and his father, despite being scared to death of them barely a year ago, both shook with excitement the day before their boats left. Some people, it seemed, just were meant for danger.

 

Shiro was just like his parents, in that regard. For when he was twelve years old, a ratty thing of a boy reached his hand into Shiro’s left pocket and grasped his wallet in his hands, Shiro didn’t report him. Shiro didn’t throw him off with disgust and hurry on home, no, no, what Shiro _did_ with the boy was fill his belly up, because the kid looked like a wet Weasel Snake and had a look in his eyes that Shiro knew far, far, far too well, would end up with the boy in the wrong end of a jail cell or in a morgue.

 

The boy looked familiar, like someone Shiro had not only met once, but someone who’d Shiro lived with for _lifetimes._ Touching him meant that Shiro felt frost and heat dance up his spine, and sprout into a blooming flower of affection in his brain.

 

Shiro didn’t believe in spirits and reincarnation that much, before. However, as they, like the Earth and the Moon, orbited around each other and grew closer, Shiro could only conclude that this wasn’t the only life they’d met in. That their paths were meant to cross, their hands meant to hold, and their lips meant to touch, like on a bright, summer day, when he was 16, and heading to the Garrison.

 

At long last Shiro could protect people, like he’d always wanted to, dressed in a clean, pressed uniform, and able to disrupt and destroy the henious Galra Empire at last. And once he would come home, he would change his home just the same, to make all of the five nations hospitable and kind to all, no matter their colour, their nation, their clothes, or their coin.

 

At the Garrison, he soared up above the other recruits, practiced day and night to hone his skills, to better himself, and at the end of six months, he became the youngest ever graduate of the Garrison. And on his first mission, he was sent on a tiny transport ship to join the resistance slumbering within the Empire, and he’d climbed on board and waved goodbye to his friends, heard the engine slowly rev up into a low roar, heard Sea Lion Gulls bray up above, and, and, and then--

 

and then the boat was attacked

 

and he was taken

 

taken into a cold hot cold place full of other squirming souls and dumped onto land like a bag of kittens into a lake

 

and he was unmade.

 

At 18, Shiro stepped onto Fire Confederacy soil for the first time in a year, and, despite the face that was no doubt waiting in the crowds, he didn’t feel like he was home. For he wasn’t Shiro anymore, no, for he was something else, he was something foul and disgusting and sticky and heinous and worse and was--

  
An alien. He was an alien, not belonging to any land but that of the dead.


End file.
